(Newser)
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Johnny Depp has more acting chops, hotness, and wealth than anyone could want, but even the superstar's knees buckled when he agreed to make his singing debut in the new silver-screen musical, Sweeney Todd, opening this Friday. "I was scared to death," he told the Chicago Sun-Times. Yet predictably, critics are already fawning over his performance in the gory Tim Burton adaptation.

Depp was in a band when he was young, but he was "more the guy with the guitar who did some oohs and ahhs." To prep for Sweeney Todd, in which he plays a barber who sends clients to a bakery to be cooked into pies, he packed in some singing lessons. He relished the challenge: "for an actor, it's important to be teetering on the brink of absolute flopdom," he said.